


to breathe in safety

by strikinglight



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Child Murder, Family, Gen, Non-Graphic Violence, Pre-Game(s), Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-19
Updated: 2016-07-19
Packaged: 2018-07-25 10:28:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7529200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the children were killed there were no more candles lit in the east banquet hall. All but three of them were dead now, and the women too. Xander had forgotten their names but he could still count their seats all the same, standing empty at a table on which dust had already begun to settle.</p><p>Some would call it a miracle that the three were still alive and whole. Xander called it punishment, for how long it kept him awake through the night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to breathe in safety

**Author's Note:**

> _The truth is that no one can hurt us except the people we love._  
>   
>  \- Jorge Luis Borges, “In Praise of Darkness”

Xander remembers there were so many of them in the beginning, how easy it was to fill the seats at the long table in the east banquet hall. They all took the evening meal together in those days—because it was proper, because it was safe—his mother in the queen’s place at the head and him at her right hand as the crown prince, and all his father’s ladies and their children ranged before them according to rank, all the way down. There was always roast boar on the table, some nights a minstrel working the strings.

In those days, Xander remembers, the servants lit the candles all along the walls, every last one, until the room glowed like a sky full of stars.

His mother had taught him all the names that mattered, of the women and their children and their houses. She made sure he knew them all and all the formal words of greeting besides, the appropriate depth of each bow. Xander thought of the days he’d been spending on the other side of the castle, of his father and the training yard and the bruising rap of a wooden sword against the backs of his knees, and he knew this training was much the same thing. He had known even then that it wasn’t safe, not truly, even if the women were pretty and sweet and always careful not to touch him. The truth was that the women reminded Xander more than anything of a flock of exotic birds, because they did not speak so much as coo or twitter, because the jewels at their wrists and throats gleamed green and blue and red in the candlelight.

His father the king rarely came to the east wing. The women came to him when he called them to his rooms to break bread, a pair of serving-girls with lanterns to light the way before them, long trailing skirts whispering across the floor, and those nights their seats at the table would be empty.

He didn’t think so much, then, about claws. He had had his mother beside him, and it was always easier to be brave when she was around, with all the candles lit at her behest and her hand to hold on to under the table, even with the darkness rising outside their windows, the storms in Nohr’s skies always so close.

He knew all the children even without having to be taught. Dietrich who had been born two seasons after him, tall and strong and fond of riding. Mariana the embroiderer and Camilla learning needlepoint at her knee, and lightfooted Sabine who led all the dances in the great hall. And the younger ones too, ever-underfoot and running through the corridors, all smudgy cheeks and scarred elbows and voices like bells—Conrad and Roland, Theodor, Giselle. Small Leo with the moonlight-hair, asleep day and night in an ivory cradle. Xander knew where all their rooms were, played and sang with them some afternoons, because he was not crown prince when they were alone together. At such times they were all the same, children with different mothers and a father who walked in another world.

Then the wasting sickness had come and taken all the roses from Katerina’s cheeks and all the honey from her hair. Xander had stood by her bedside and felt the fear rise in his chest. He thought of the candles in the banquet hall burning low, imagined them melted down to pools of wax in which the smallest finger-widths of flame still flickered and lurched.

But his mother, her lips pale, her voice a thread of air in the camphor-choked stillness of her room, had smiled at him and reached up to hold his hand, had said, My son, my good son.

Keep them close, she said. You mustn’t be alone. And Xander could not think of the words to ask who _they_ were, or how she could still think he had it in him to protect anyone when she lay here dying with her hand in his. He had wanted to say, I will never be king. I don’t want it anymore. If you give them to me I’ll fail them too.

He knelt close by her at the end and found the floor cold, but her hand was warm even as she went, the ring his father had given her white gold and moonstone and glistening.

Fear. Lily flowers on the marble altar in the Dusk Dragon’s temple, ashen faces and black mourning dress, moonlight fracturing down through the high windows to where she lay in state. He knelt even if he knew the stones would bruise his knees, remained there in front of her for hours upon hours, back straight as a javelin in spite of the shaking that had started, traitorously, in his legs.

Xander would not leave the altar. At the back of the room his father stood, as though himself carved from stone, and would not go to it.

But first the women had approached, had murmured, We are sorry, Prince Xander, though their eyes were on Katerina and her lilies and her quiet, folded hands. Their voices were behind him and above, and no matter how impossibly tall they might have seemed to him then he knew they could no longer touch his mother. Neither did they touch him—not yet—though for a heartbeat he was afraid one of them would try, and he felt the black claw of the fear again at the back of his throat.

After their mothers had finished playing at prayer and dispersed the children had come, one by one in the order of their birth, all but the smallest. They had stood around him, making a fortress with their bodies. We are sorry, Xander, they too said into the silence. We are sorry, we are sorry.

He had wanted to stand and pull them all close to himself, all his brothers and sisters, but by then the tremors had crept upward and seized his arms too, and he knew that they could not possibly be strong enough.

 

* * *

 

I will take no new wife, Garon had told him, in the beginning.

Xander knew even then that it was a lie, although at the time his father must have meant it as truth. After the queen died the king must always either die of a broken heart or marry again, and Xander knew that Garon had already broken his heart long ago. He had divided its jagged pieces among the women in the east wing and turned his head away in despair when it came to blood over who had the bigger share—who, in the end, would see it made whole again and placed in her hands, all of the king’s heart hers alone until death.

Choose one of them, Xander had thought, eyes on the sword mounted on the wall of his father’s room. Choose none. We are all dead.

Some things even a king must kneel for, Katerina had said once, and sure enough the days without her became one year, became two, brought a woman to them out of a storm. Her name was Arete and no one knew where she had come from. All they knew was that she was beautiful, and that she had sung a song before the court in exchange for sanctuary, and Garon had listened and bent the knee and made her his queen. A woman with hair the color of the sky in spring, golden eyes slanting like a cat’s.

More than once she had looked Xander in the eye as she mounted the dais at his father’s side and smiled, and he had returned her smile even though she was not his mother. For a moment he had felt warm, for a moment he had almost thought—

But then he had heard the way the women’s voices hissed around the syllables of her name—Arete, Arete-come-out-of-the-lightning, Arete of the siren-voice, the witch from the other side of the mountains _—_ had heard them whispering to one another as they returned to their rooms. She did not take up residence in the east wing, but lodged instead in the west, in the king’s own quarters.

It does not matter, they said. Before the year is out there will be no more Arete.

She has a daughter, you know, they said. A small singing witch-child in the tallest tower, but no one is to look on her. No one is to speak to her.

Look to yourselves, they said, and to your children. And Xander thought again of his brothers and sisters and the scattered shards of his father’s heart and knew he could not do that to his own, could not cut it up and give it away so many times over. He thought of the girl who was not—could not be—his sister, and saw the world fracture before his eyes, broken and shimmering and cold.

 

* * *

 

The days became one year, became two, became the winter that took Arete, and after that it was as if Death came through the door and never left. Death lingered in the royal house, emptying the seats at the table one by one; it tumbled Dietrich from his horse and drove a needle into the back of Mariana’s neck in the night. When the servants found the berries in Sabine’s bowl—black belladonna mixed innocently in with her raisins and her sugared almonds—no one ate in the banquet hall anymore.

Each time they were lain on the altar in the temple with white linen draped over their bodies. Each time Xander stood—did not kneel, but stood, drawing his shoulders up high to try and look taller than he felt—before the bodies and grit his teeth against the trembling that threatened always to seize him again. Each time he found himself out of prayers to repeat and settled instead for I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry, the words so faint he could barely hear himself. He didn’t know if he had loved them, or even if he knew how.

Behind and above him he could still hear the women, skirts rustling, murmuring to one another from behind painted fans. My condolences, my dear. My condolences. He was old enough then to hear the question, the unspoken words keen as a knife in the dark: Was it you? Was it you? Was it you?

The younger ones were no longer allowed to go to him or even to speak to him much—no longer allowed to stray at all from their mothers’ sides, held still by clawed fingers around wrists and who knew what other invisible chains. But at Sabine’s wake Camilla had risen from her seat and made her way to where he stood. Camilla next-eldest, grown tall and fair in the dark center of those dark years.

He had tried to warn her away with a glance, tell her don’t come close to me, Death will touch you too, but she had folded her hands in front of her as if in prayer and turned her eyes forward, pretending not to see. The wide velvet sleeves of her gown had slid back to show him the bruises that spotted her forearms, purple-black as belladonna.

If your mother sees us, he’d started to say out of the corner of his mouth. But she’d only smiled at him sweetly and said, I’ll fight, brother, and the shame of it had nearly sent Xander to his knees.

(Xander knows now that when she was ten years old Camilla had had one of the maids cut off all her hair so her mother could not claw at it in her anger. When she was thirteen she had told her mother she would never take the throne, and her mother had struck her so hard her body had hit the floor and skidded over the stones. He would not hear these stories, though, until years later, after Camilla had grown her hair out again all the way down to her hips and traded her dresses for armor. She was strong by then, brave enough to recount them to him with that same smile that turned his blood to ice.)

 

* * *

 

The night Leo had come to his rooms to tell him Mother is broken, Xander hadn’t understood. The Leo he remembered had not been much more than feathery hair and a bundle of blankets, barely even able to open his eyes. He couldn’t place the small, solemn boy before him now, watching him from the doorway.

He could not have been more than three, four years old then. But his eyes looked old, older even than Xander. Older for a moment than the very stones of the castle.

It was only when he heard the screaming that he turned and saw the body sprawled at the foot of the steps leading down into the inner courtyard, still as a puppet with the strings all cut. Arms and legs and head askew at strange angles, face to the ground. No blood, and Xander couldn’t decide if what he felt was relief or horror. The night had been so quiet before this.

Mother’s not moving, Leo said, by Xander’s elbow now, and he realized he hadn’t even heard him come into the room. His voice was soft, dispassionate, but the tiny hand that came up and curled its fingers in the back of Xander’s shirt told him more. She’s broken, he said again, without turning away.

For the life of him Xander couldn’t remember her name—he had been so good at this when he was younger—couldn’t remember anything about who she had been except that she was Leo’s mother and that he had never seen her carry him. Not before the entire court on his naming-day, not ever.

He did not say It could have been you, even though he knew it wasn’t difficult to push a child down a flight of stairs. Children fell down all the time, put a foot wrong and went tumbling and didn’t get up again, especially when no one was watching. Neither did he say I am glad it wasn’t you, though when he looked hard at Leo’s too-large bedrobe and his bare feet the feeling was closer to him than he knew he’d ever admit.

Instead he closed and locked the shutters to muffle the noise outside—the screaming that hadn’t stopped, the running feet. Afterward he turned to Leo and asked, Do you want to stay here?

Leo had looked back at him with a wrinkled brow, puzzling over the word _want._ I have to stay here?

No, Leo, Xander said. I’m asking you a question. And again, more slowly, Do you want to stay here?

The second time Xander could see he understood, and then there was no hesitation. Only a Yes, I want to stay here, in the same flat voice, and the tightly curled-in C-shape of Leo’s body in the center of his bed, and a broadsword leaning against the far wall of his room that he could still barely lift. But there was a knife he did know how to use, a slim, sharp thing he always carried under his clothes, and through the long lamplit hours Xander sat restless and alert in his reading chair, testing the heft of it in his hand.

 

* * *

 

After the children were killed there were no more candles lit in the east banquet hall. All but three of them were dead now, and the women too—dead or sent back to their fathers’ houses with perfunctory letters and bags of gold, which was itself another kind of dying. Xander had forgotten their names but he could still count their seats all the same, standing empty at a table on which dust had already begun to settle.

Some would call it a miracle that the three were still alive and whole. Xander called it punishment, for how long it kept him awake through the night.

 

* * *

  

The girl his father brought back from Cheve stood with her head down and her arms held out in front of her as though bound.

Take her inside and get some food in her, his father had said as he and his personal guard swept past, leaving Xander and the girl behind, chain and plate mail clamoring in their ears. She is your sister now.

She cannot stay here, Xander told his father’s back. Far be it for the crown prince to speak against the king, but he had looked at her and known the shadows would eat her alive, and found he could not be silent on this as he had been silent all these years.

Garon had shrugged, had not even looked back when he said, No indeed. Tomorrow you will take her north.

Then the men had passed and left Xander alone with her on the steps.

He checked her wrists, saw the skin rubbed angry and raw where the ropes had been cut from it, looked down and saw bare feet. Her long hair had slid forward over her shoulders, the strands snarling and tangled, and she wouldn’t look up. Only her arms moved when she saw the men were gone; folding inward toward her body, holding herself against the cold. Shaking.

Here, like this, Xander thought, she was nobody’s child. Nobody’s playing-piece. At least not yet. So the crown prince of Nohr went down on one knee before the Hoshidan girl—some things even kings, or future kings, must kneel for—peered through the briar-forest of her hair into her face, and asked, What is your name?

Corrin, she’d said, in a brittle, breathless little whisper of a voice that told him he would be fighting for this for the rest of his life.

 

* * *

 

One day at the turn of winter his father called him to the west wing and showed him the empty room in the tallest tower, the single chair by the window upended, the bedclothes in disarray. He asked, Do you remember the girl who lived here?

Xander hadn’t known how to answer. He had tried and found himself dismayed at how thin the threads were that did come back to him—just a voice ghosting through the halls on windy nights, a flash of white skirt and long hair around a corner. Wide, wet eyes, light brown or amber or gold in the torchlight. Though those could have just been Arete’s eyes; he still remembered Arete’s face, how sometimes she had smiled at him, and it would not have been a lie to say it made him hate himself a little.

Just as well, his father had said, when he said nothing.

Just as well, he thought. Gains and losses. She was by no means his first loss, but he hated himself all the time for how his father’s words tore him in two—part of him resisting, fighting to remember _something,_ anything, however small, the other releasing, telling him it didn’t matter, he hadn’t even known her name.

He hated how part of his heart had leapt, undeniably, had sped without restraint toward the ones who remained. He had thought Let me keep them, had thought They’re mine, and he hated that too but he couldn’t stop it.

The men who had come the other night had taken the girl east, toward the sun. Away from here, and from them, and from him and whatever he was now. Just as well, he said, as if the repetition would make it mean something. Make it true—or, failing that, make him believe.

 

* * *

 

The night Elise was born, Camilla had come to get him with Leo in hand. They’d found her with her nurse in her mother’s parlor, the bedroom door shut behind them.

It was late, and they should have been asleep, but the woman had let them in and told them that yes, she was their youngest sister even if she didn’t have a name yet. She would show them how to hold her, if they wanted.

Xander looked at Camilla. Camilla looked back at him and nodded her head, and he stepped forward so the woman could place the baby in his arms and show him how to cradle her head against his chest, support her back with his hand. Xander hadn’t known something could be so feather-light and yet so great a weight at once, not until that sleeping body, soft and rosy and warm in the firelight.

Do you want to hold her, Camilla had asked, but Leo shrunk behind, shaking his head and protesting, I can’t, she’s so small. It occurred to Xander just then that he’d never seen his little brother look so afraid.

It was funny when, the next night, Leo was the one who couldn’t stop trying to tell Corrin about her, talking with his hands when the words wouldn’t come. She’s only this big. This big, and all blanket, no arms and legs. No eyes yet either, but her hair is like stars. Made of stars.

When Corrin asked him what color their new sister’s hair was, Leo had frowned, bringing his fist close to his mouth, at a loss for words. Behind and over their heads Xander looked at Camilla again. She’d smiled, and they held their peace.

In the end Corrin had tried another question: Is it the same as yours? She’d touched his hair as she said it, sifting the strands between her fingers.

Leo had looked so bewildered, so struck with wonder as he answered Yes, a little bit, and Xander remembered the fear from the night before and understood—this was the same thing, this was its other face.

 

* * *

 

All the kings and queens of Nohr were interred in the crypt under the castle. Once every month since she died Xander had gone there alone to visit Katerina, but it was only after Elise came that he started bringing flowers.

Occasionally Leo or Camilla would bring flowers too, though they never asked to accompany him, and he never saw them on the stone steps leading down, not leaving or returning. But he knew that from time to time they would do as he did. He would find evidence of it at the foot of his mother’s marble effigy—pink and white carnations, tulips, hyacinths, but no lilies, never any lilies—and as he laid his own white roses down among them he always thought that everything around him smelled cleaner than it should have done, here where the dead lay dreaming, so deep under the earth.

By then he knew what it meant. So he knelt and talked to his mother, told her all about the wyvern Camilla had tamed and Leo’s love for the oldest, dustiest books in the castle library, about the little girl he’d been learning lullabies for, and the other in the Northern Fortress who watched for him every evening. He told her he could not but love them, helplessly, these three sisters and this brother—because they had stayed with him, because they were his, and because nothing but her bright spirit in this dark, dark house could have taught them how to love him even when he was weak.

 

* * *

 

Sleep doesn’t come easily to Xander even now, even though he knows he doesn’t always have to face his fears with his eyes open, but maybe that’s expected. He works through all his days, gives his mornings to sword practice, his afternoons to the king’s council, in the hopes that at night his body will simply surrender. He is strong enough, now, to swing Siegfried overhand.

Sometimes—more often these days than before—Camilla sits in council with him, leans to one side in her chair so her shoulder presses against his upper arm. They say nothing about how the years have dug their claws into their father. They don’t talk about how they’re afraid of what he is now, because to do so would make it real. The darkness is too big, the promise of war too near to them, and even the eldest prince and princess are still too small.

Leo is likewise a short sleeper, but mostly because he stays up all night reading. He would likely spend all day reading too if Elise would let him, if she would only stop trying to wedge her body into a chair meant for one, covering the pages with her hands and tugging at his hair. Xander despairs of them when he catches them fighting like this but never tells them to grow up; instead he sweeps Elise up over one shoulder and carries her away, shrieking with laughter. He always leaves candles on Leo’s table when he isn’t looking, even if he knows his brother is not afraid of the dark.

Every evening, barring storm or snow, they ride north to see Corrin. They eat together in her solar, and Xander stokes the fire while Camilla combs her hair. The younger ones sprawl on their bellies on the floor, drawing pictures to cover the walls of her room with.

It’s always well into the night when they decide, finally, to leave. He knows he shouldn’t, but with Corrin he’s always saying yes. Yes when she asks him to teach her the sword, yes when she asks him if they’ll visit again tomorrow. Only Camilla is worse. But always when she asks if she can return to the castle with them, even when she clings to his waist and looks up at him with fight and fire in her eyes, Xander finds he’s strong enough to tell her no. She wants to be with them every day. She wants to go where they go, but she isn’t ready yet, even with brothers and sisters ready to stand between her and the shadows.

Tomorrow, little princess, he says, though it always tears at him a bit to unlock her arms and step away. Tomorrow, I promise.

The ride home is always the same. Leo broods, Elise pouts, Camilla giggles and prods and teases to try and lift their spirits. Xander rides with Siegfried at his side and his eyes forward. But he knows all of them—at least once, far more than just once—will look over their shoulders for the lantern Corrin sets in her window. He knows they’ll find it, without fail, after each visit—a flame in the night to see the way home by, burning steadily until they come back.

**Author's Note:**

> screams into the void because all the backstory-plotholes were absolute hell to skate around
> 
> also pre-slime!garon's character is such a thorny incomprehensible mess, which is why he's...... mostly absent here. nothing is more important than the children anyway. the children are all-important.
> 
> slinks away into the darkness plz forgive me
> 
> ETA: title culled from ["justice and mercy" by flyleaf](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyNPkL4VdS8) i.e. this fic in song form, basically


End file.
